A pseudo-fictional review of Lovefool and AdminAdmin Issue #1 at Strawberry, 2024
1996: it was the summer before sixth grade. It was also the summer Jill Bates told my friend John she wanted to give him a handjob. None of us had gotten a handjob before and even less of us knew what it actually was.
While going through John’s older sister’s stuff, we found a sample of Lifestyles lubricant in one of her Dolly magazines. After John used the Lifestyles to jerk off, he came to the conclusion that, without a doubt, that’s what it felt like to fuck a girl.
We were almost teenagers in post-grunge Australia. Tuesday afternoons we spent in the forest behind school sharing a single cigarette between five of us; each accusing the last of bum puffing. We took turns listening to bands like Weezer, The Offspring, Alien Ant Farm and blink-182 on John’s silver Discman. We considered these afternoons important and more importantly, ourselves cool.
Six years later, after I lost my virginity to Melanie Rogers on a sweat-stained sheetless mattress forty minutes after she fucked my friend Ryan, I realised that John’s hypothesis was utterly incorrect; masturbating with Lifestyles lubricant is not the same as having sex with a girl.
Back to the summer of 1996. John and I were riding our bikes as fast as we could to Jill’s house. Jill was broad, humorous and developed giant tits much earlier than most of the other girls at school. She was also the first person I knew who owned a Tupac t-shirt.
That afternoon while riding to Jill’s house with John, I got this strange feeling. The turquoise sky of late summer collapsed into an amplified orange dirge. Tropical storms are common during South East Queensland summers, but that afternoon was different. The streets glowed with a purple veneer and the dogs at every house barked as if they knew what was going on before we did.
Within minutes we were caught (in what we later learnt) was a tropical cyclone. We huddled with our bikes under the nearest bus stop, two blocks from Jill’s house. Plastic, metal, empty glass, used hygiene products and discarded souvenirs were violently ripped from an adjacent dumpster.
For thirty minutes, hailstones the size of golf balls struck the glass-clad shelter. Veins of lighting lit the sky with almost instantaneous cracks of thunder. When it was over, only the steel frame and corrugated iron lid of the bus stop remained.
Drenched, grazed, and half-chubbed with pre-teen excitement, John and I carried our bikes over the broken glass and continued riding to Jill’s. We arrived to her Lutheran parents making a huge fuss. They seemed angry. Why were we out in such a bad storm? Did our parents know where we were? Of course our parents had no idea, but John and I were great liars so Jill’s mum gave us each a dry pair of clothes and we spent the evening playing Nintendo, skating in their family garage and feeding Jill’s older brother’s baby reef shark he kept in a saltwater fish tank in his bedroom.
The feeling I got that afternoon was different to anything I’d experienced before then. I have felt it a few times since but that summer of 1996 was the first time.
It was different from the time in eighth grade my mother washed my mouth out because I called my older sister and her friends ‘gayfucks’ for playing The Cardigans irritatingly loud. Love me, love me, say that you love me. My mother put so much Listerine in my mouth, I choked and spewed the translucent blue liquid across every surface of the family bathroom. But it was close.
It was different from the feeling I got when I was sixteen and toy-shamed for not knowing to remove the flow rate strainer-thing from the nozzle on the import paint cans we shoplifted from the local 99c shop. But it was close.
It was different from the feeling I got when I was twenty and my girlfriend Anna broke up with me and revealed she’d been fucking my best friend and housemate for most of our relationship. But it was close.
It was different from the time I was arrested for possession of a Schedule 9 substance while my housemate overdosed beside me. An ambulance was called, but out of what I now understand as an ill-conceived sense of fear, emergency services sent the cops in first to arrest myself and two others before it was ‘safe’ for paramedics to attend to Beau. But it was close. Each of these moments marked a point where I lost a little more innocence.
I might have left the hypocritical, strung-out Jesus freaks of Brisbane for like minded gallery-drunk midwits in Melbourne, yet the detrital junk that flooded the streets that afternoon in 1996 feels just as familiar now — excepting perhaps a vape and smartphone — as it did then. Milk bottles, champagne flutes, hygiene products, extruded enemas, dictaphone (for blackmail), Lifestyles lubricant and import paint cans; these are the scaffolding which hold a network of personal desire in Grace Anderson's’ Lovefool.
Rather than representing a homogeneity of Australian consumption over almost two decades, these are objects which speak more to an archeological conception of personal junk becoming a witness to time. By casting herself as the primary star in her own psychodrama, Lovefool exposes a confessional scenario, a charismatic mise-en-scène that speaks to love, loss, pathos, and desperation.
Here we are looking at not ‘truth’ but a montage of debased feminine vignettes: three prep-school girls on a bench beside a boy with foreskin for a face, tangled leads of hairdryers and straighteners, an excess of wonky champagne flutes, a portrait of a morning after emergency contraception pill and a vape in the silhouette of batman foregrounding nipple-pink underlays.
With each canvas hugged by a scattered collection of personal objects, I imagine the artist performing the role of an abject decorator, arranging and rearranging things just so. Brands are redacted or turned from the audience, assumedly to obscure the fact these beauty products are at an expensive incongruence with the disordered, excessive, drink and drug-affected sensibility of the exhibition.
Perhaps an outcome of proximity, distance or my failure to recognise the difference, it feels easy to draw a likeness between Lovefool and AdminAdmin Issue #1, an art magazine published by Rebecca Holborn and Guy Benfield, which subsequently launched on the final day of Anderson’s exhibition. The paintings, the walls, the aging punks were moving slowly. They look forward. They all looked forward.
In an interview with the Museum of Modern Art in 2017, Swiss artist Peter Fischli remarked, ‘We can be more than one artist,’ implying value in multiplicity, diversity and the fallacy of an ego capable of being killed.1 I can’t help but feel like Lovefool, AdminAdmin Issue #1 and for that matter, many of the artists exhibited at Strawberry this year take a reactionary stance against this overwhelmingly orthodox liberal ideal. This begs the question: how far can one navigate a vision of outsider contemporaneity constituted within a twentieth century amnesia?
Equally expressive, impulsive and endowed with a kind of frenetic uselessness, both Lovefool and AdminAdmin Issue #1 feels kind of like throwing a party that by design, nobody can enjoy themselves at. A party where the adolescent enthusiasm that ‘anything is possible’ recedes in the face of a more serious concern, that is, a stubborn refusal for historical interpretation and formal determinism. What is left is an approximation of a moment in time. The Australian dream run through a blender. Through this, the past infects the present with its return, fabricating a disjuncture which can only take the appearance of nostalgia. A nostalgia which is not a repetition of form but a return to the ideas and ideals of a previous time which, like the blonde timber floorboards of Strawberry, shift and creak against the joints of a future which will never arrive.
- ADS Donaldson, AdminAdmin Issue 1, 2024.
Samm Sutton (b. 1993) is an is an artist and writer living in Melbourne, Australia.